THE PIRATE SONG: Eye Patches and Peg Legs in Somalia?

“Coming up to them, there has passed some common shot between some of our fleet and some of them; and as far as we perceive, they are determined to sell their lives with blows.”

-Sir Francis Drake

Although quite chic these days, piracy is not a new concept.  Since man has plied the sea for commerce, other men have made a living by taking those cargoes for themselves.  In fact, even the ancient Greeks were forced to enlist a massive naval force to suppress a pirate threat in the picturesque Mediterranean  in 67 BC.

Piracy spread rampantly throughout the middle ages, with Viking and Muslim Pirates attacking not just sea-going vessels, but often raiding small coastal cities; taking slaves and robbing villages of their riches.  Eventually, piracy evolved to the way we like to think of it today: eye patches, pieces of eight, buried treasure, and a democratic utopia for crewmen with equality for all.

This period is referred to as the “Classic Era” of piracy, and a lot of the Hollywood mystique of sailing under the Skull n’ Crossbones is based in fact.  However, as we are all aware, piracy did not go away.  Although the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama in recent weeks has brought the Somali piracy issue to a global forefront, the issue is by no means cut and dried (I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I tend to gravitate towards these types of issues).

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) established in 1982, defined any act of detention, violence, or depredation commited for private ends against any crew or passenger of a private ship illegal. This is of course what the Somali pirates have done, and are therefore guilty of grievously flouting a strong international statuate.  My first reaction was to advocate a deployment of a Navy Seal team (wearing eyepatches and brandishing cutlasses (not the Oldsmobile kind)) and hang those Somali’s from the yardarms.

Of course, after researching the sitatuation, I found that the most of the Somali “pirates” are former fishermen whose territorial waters have been poached by Western and Japanese fishing outfits.  The fish that have not been poached have been killed by hazardous waste material unearthed after the devestating tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004.  Over 10 million tons of hazardous waste had been dumped along Somalia’s vast uninhabited shoreline since the early 1980′s by Western multi-national corporations after paying Somali warlords over $60 million for the privelege.

Now of course, what the Somali pirates are doing is wrong, dangerous, and against all international convention.  Not to mention, the fishermen carrying out the actual act of piracy are low men on the totem pole, and no one know how high that pole is our what direction it falls (Tenuous links between Somali brigands and terrorist organizations such as Al-Queda are beginning to be uncovered) .  Suffice it to say, however, that the situation is not necessarily as portrayed on network television (I know, I am just as shocked as y’all)!